"But singing is about sexual confidence/ So sing out your guts if you feel good enough ..." Hawksley Workman, Paper Shoes.

 It takes guts just to string the words "singing" and "confidence" together in the same sentence these days, let alone put them into a song.

 Confidence in singers is unfashionable, and when it isn't being feigned ironically, it's often hidden behind a thick layer of put-on humility.

 Hawksley Workman, however, isn't hiding anything.

 "I am confident," the Toronto-based singer-songwriter says, looking up from his cranberry juice with unblinking sincerity during an interview in a downtown bar earlier this week.

 Workman, playing his first major headlining show at the Rivoli Tuesday, smiles: "I'm a perfectionist in the sense that whatever I do I think is perfect."

 What's amazing about Workman -- beyond his stunning debut album For Him And The Girls, which he released this past fall on his own Isadora label -- is that his glowing confidence isn't an act, but it is relevant to his work.

 At 24, he's utterly self-aware. He's put deep thought into his music after the fact, and he explains what he does with the precision of a musicologist looking in from outside. But he's not cocky.

 "The less I think about things when I work, the way better I am," he says. "I'm not necessarily an intellectual, and I'm not particularly well-read, either. But I have such a trust, I believe in my intuition. These songs didn't take more than a day each to write. A lot of them were recorded in first-takes. But it's a 50/50 thing -- the songs don't just come to me, I have to sit down and focus. There's a certain consciousness to what I do. The music is always there, and I'm very thankful for that. I don't think I pray near enough."

 Workman's conversation reflects the sound of his album: Eccentric, warm, scattered one minute and poignant the next.

 For Him was originally meant to be the "sexually naive" first-half of a two album set, but the discs were merged into one that mixes cabaret balladry that betrays his recent classical vocal training, art-rock, and timeless pop and folk. "My record is made of wood, and arguably the same kind of wood throughout," he says. "But maybe it's painted different colours."

 It also boasts smart tunes and highly original lyrics (one song, Bullets, is a light-hearted love song inspired by Workman's grandparents' wartime experiences).

 "I really wanted to be a poet when I was a kid," the singer says. "Not a published poet, but words sound so fantastic to me and I could detect the power in them when I was young. But I couldn't wield that power in a way that I knew would make an impact on people. I tried to write when I was 12 or 13. No go. I remember recording a record when I was 20 and thinking, 'This isn't it either.' It was close, but not quite it."

 The album's quirkiness has drawn easy comparisons to both Tom Waits, Toronto's Rheostatics, and Workman's collaborator John Southworth, which seems to irk him a bit.

 Knocked off their feet

 But with production that's glowing but not glossy -- he played all the instruments and produced it himself in his eight-track home studio -- he arrived seemingly out-of-nowhere, fully-formed creatively, knocking many local musos and critics off their feet.

 Workman, originally from Bay Lake, north of Huntsville, even came with a sense of lore: His bio is an excellently written, quasi-fictional story in which he claims to work in a tap dance academy; Hawksley Workman, if you hadn't already guessed, is not his real name; Isadora, his label, is also the name of an imaginary "ideal lover" to whom he's been addressing letters in the personal section of Now Magazine.

 "I was living alone," he explains, "and the kind of energy and passion one might reserve for another person I put into this ideal lover who was almost a deity, but totally attainable. She lives underwater, and she'd teach me to breathe underwater too ..."

 Still, behind Workman's engaging dreamer, is a clear-thinking and highly-motivated artist.

 "I've been working on this for a long time," he says. "I feel extremely plugged in now, but not into the same socket that everybody else is plugged into."